Accros a number of disciplines the concept of cooperation plays a more important role, while the concept of competition gets a less important role. We are moving into another economic form that is fundamentally different from previous ones: COLLABORATION ECONOMICS.
The relationship between Communication, Media and Collective Action: Human communication, Media and the ways in which we organize socially have been co-evolving for quite a long time. Now, the enabling cooperation-technologies are based on the internet: In the many-to-many era every desktop is now a printing press, a broadcasting station, a community or a market place AND evolution is speeding up from desktop to personal mobile supercomputers to personal mobile ambient computing.
Howard Rheingold about Collaboration Economics: "Altruistic punishment may be the glue that holds societies together".
Collective action is about two types of Social dilemma's: (1) The prisoners dilemma c.q the ultimatum game and (2) The tragedy of the commons.
(1) The ultimatum game learnings: People from other cultures have radically different ideas of what is fair. Somehow the basis of our economic transactions can be influenced by our social institutions.
(2) The tragedy of the commons (Gerard Harden): Humans will inevitably destroy any common pool resource in which people cannot be restrained from using it. In case after case humans destroy the commons that they depended on. But in a growing number of instances we see people able to escape from the prisoners dilemma (= fundamental, disruptive change of economic form). People are only prisoners as long as they consider themselves to be. People escaped by creating institutions for collective action in which cooperative arrangements have moved from a periferral rol to a central role.
Collaboration economics create new forms of wealth. Jim Surwicki and Yochai Benkler describe how the new collaboration-economics-form is emerging (open source, new form of production, peer-to-peer production). In the past, new forms of cooperation (enabled by new technologies) created new forms of weatlh. Conclusion: We are moving into yet another economic form that is significally different from previous ones.
Cases: HP & IBM are open sourcing their software, Ely Lilli has created a market for solutions, Toyota treaths their suppliers as a network and trains their suppliers. Why? Because they learned that a certain kind of sharing is in their self interest. Google is enriching others not because of altruism, but as a way of enriching themselves. Ebay caused fundamental, disruptive change; it solved the prisoners dilemma and created a market where none would have excisted (by creating a feedback-mechanism that turns a prisoner's dilemma into a insurance game).
We don't know enough yet and are just beginning to discover what the basic principles are. This is just the beginning - we should and will soon learn more about the technologies of Cooperation & Sharing:
1. Easy to use
2. Enable connections
3. Open
4. Group forming
5. Self-instructions
6. Leverage self interest
We should start by developing maps of this cooperation-territory, so that we can talk about it accros disciplines. In the past, new ways of thinking helped alleviating suffering. What forms of of suffering could be alleviated and what forms of wealth could be created if we knew a little bit more about the new forms of cooperation. Get the cooperation project started!
Yochai Benkler: Open Source Economics
Peer-to-peer filesharing is fundamentally a distruted data storage and retrieval system.
We see the emergence of a fourth transactional framework: Social sharing & Exchange (social production). Not that it is the first time that we do nice things to each other as social beings (we do it all the time), but for the first time with a major economic impact.
Social sharing & exchange as a modality of economic production:
Characteristics:
1. decentralized authority and capacity to contribute to effective action. (instead of property, asking permission: 'may I create?) .
2. Open for anyone to create, innovate and share, if they want to. Property is one mechanism of coordination, but it is not the only one. Instead what we see are social frameworks for all of the critical things that we use property in the market, normally.
3. Motivation structures are different. Money isn't always the best motivator, think of sex.
4. It also requires new organizational approaches. Task organisation. You don't have to hire experts, now take the same problem and chunk it into small pieces and give people 5 minutes time.
-> A new social phenomenon is emerging.
1. New form of competition: It's creating and it's most visible if we see it als a new form of competition (P2P -> Recording industry, Free/open source software -> Microsoft, Skype -> Telecomms, Wikipedia -> Encarta)
2. But it is also a new source of opportunities for companies:
A new set of social relations and social behaviors emerging
- Some of it are toolmaker: for newly able users
- You built platforms for self expression and collaboration.
- Surfers
-> Stuff will flow out of connected human beings = social production.
Social production = a real fact, not a fad: it's the critical long term shift caused by the internet
Social production = in some contexts more efficient than markets or firms
Social production = sustainable and growing fast
Social production = a threat to, and threatened by, incumbent industrial models (intellectual property, telecomms, other new funky laws are the battlefield over the institutional ecology)
Four transactional frameworks:
Decentralized, market based: Price-system
Decentralized, non-market: Social sharing & exchange
Centralized, market based: Firm hierarchy
Centralized, non market: Government; non-profits
It also requires certain new organizational approaches. From task-organization (you have to hire people to tell them what to do, what to do with their time).
A new social phenomen
A new form of competition.
Charles Leadbeater over Collaboration Economics: "Je bent wat je deelt". In de wereld van de Britse innovatie-deskundige Leadbeater (boek We-Think) is de mens niet langer consument, maar deelnemer. Internet maakt samenwerken en delen tussen grote groepen mensen waar ook ter wereld mogelijk. Dat levert niet alleen nieuwe businessmodellen op. Het kan ook leiden tot fundamenteel andere manieren van gezondheidszorg of onderwijs.
Clay Shirky at TED on Institutions versus Collaborations
